Middle Falls Time Travel Series (Book 3): The Death and Life of Dominick Davidner

by Inmon, Shawn

  “Oh, yes. I see. I’m calling about the room for rent. Is it still available?”

  “No, rented that last week.”

  “Ah. Of course. Well ...”

  “I do have something left, if you ain’t picky, though.”

  Dominick didn’t like the sound of the man. He also didn’t relish the idea of draining through his savings, staying in a motel for very many nights, either.

  “Can I come see it?”

  “Suit yourself. I’m always home.” He rattled off an address in one of the neighborhoods Dominick had driven through earlier.

  Not a bad area. Close to the college.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Dominick parked on the street below a towering, slightly seedy house that was likely the bane of the neighborhood. All the other houses were well-painted, and looked like they had just returned from the beauty parlor. The Crow residence looked as if it had never stepped foot in such a place. The gutters were slightly askew, the paint was peeling, and the screen on the front door hung at an odd angle.

  Nonetheless, Dominick walked up the steps to the house and knocked on the front door. A voice on the other side yelled, “Come around to the side door!”

  Dominick peeked through the glass on the door to see if something might be blocking the door, but the path appeared clear.

  Hmm. Odd.

  He followed a small path around the side of the house, found another door, and knocked again. It seemed to take Mr. Crow a long time to arrive, especially since he knew Dominick was going to it.

  Finally the door opened, and a tall, heavy, mostly bald man filled the door. He was dressed in pajamas that might have been a Christmas gift during the Eisenhower era.

  “Hello, I’m Dominick Davidner. I called about a room?”

  Gene Crow looked Dominick up and down. Finally, he grunted, turned away from the door and said over his shoulder, “Come on, then.”

  The side door led into a small porch, and then a kitchen, which was in somewhat better condition than the exterior of the house would have led him to believe. Mr. Crow shambled ahead, through the kitchen, then a dining room piled with magazines and discarded junk mail, and into a dimly lit living room. At the end of the living room, there was a large fireplace. Mr. Crow strolled over to it, turned around, and stared at Dominick. “Well, come here.”

  “Oh!” Dominick said, unaware that his presence was required there.

  “This is the Mantle of Fame.” The way he said it, Dominick could actually hear the capital letters.

  Dominick leaned politely forward to examine the Mantle of Fame. There were a few dusty nick knacks, along with a series of Polaroids leaning up against them. Crow plucked the first one between his meaty fingers and said, “This is Jin Lee,” he said, proudly. “He studied at the university and went on to get a doctorate in Biochemistry. He came here from his home country, all by himself, and became a doctor. Graduated third in his class.”

  Dominick looked politely at the photo, which showed a young Asian man, standing in front of the very same fireplace, dressed in a suit, with a broad smile on his face. By the looks of the suit, and that horrible tie he’s wearing, I’d guess mid-sixties.

  Crow replaced the photo gingerly, then picked the next one up.

  Oh, my God. Dominick looked the length of the mantle, dotted with Polaroids. Please tell me he’s not going to give me a biography of every person in these damn pictures.

  He did. One at a time, he picked up each photo and recited what became apparent was a memorized speech about each of them. Dominick cast his eyes about, looking for any escape, but there was none. He was trapped.

  Forty-five minutes later, the lecture at the Mantle of Fame was over. Dominick hesitated to speak, afraid that he might cause him to start over and go through the whole damn speech again, but he spoke up anyway. “Is it possible for me to see the room?”

  Crow looked at him reproachfully, as though he had committed a serious breach in etiquette. “All in good time, my boy, all in good time. First, I will need to go over the house rules and take you through the rest of the house.”

  Sweet Jesus, just kill me now.

  Finally, after another hour of interminable details about which shelf of the refrigerator went with which room, when acceptable TV hours were, and on and on and on, Crow folded his hands across his protruding belly and said, “I suppose you’d like to see the room now?”

  “Yes, please,” Dominick said with a sigh. The tour had nearly sucked his will to live but he figured he had gone this far, he may as well see the room.

  “Well,” Crow said, leaning in like a conspirator, “it’s not one of my regular rooms, but I’ve been working on it the last few days. It’s downstairs. He opened a door and led Dominick down an L-shaped staircase, into a dank, smelly basement. In two corners of the basement, 8 X 10 bedrooms had been sheetrocked in. In the third corner, a coin-operated washer and dryer stood, noisily working away. In the final corner, there were some blankets hung from rafters that reached all the way to the ground.

  “I haven’t gotten around to putting the drywall up, yet, but I thought this might work out fine for a single young man, if he wasn’t too picky.” He walked to the blankets and threw one back with a theatrical flair. “It comes furnished with a bed and nightstand. There’s even a light.” He said the last as though he were Ricardo Montalban, pitching “Rich Corinthian leather.”

  Dominick twisted up his face, but poked his head into the space. An old rug had been put down over the concrete floor. The walls themselves were also concrete. A bare bulb hung down in the middle of the room. To one side, a twin bed and small night stand stood forlornly. A window above the bed and about three quarters of the way up the wall showed where ground level was.

  Crow smiled broadly, which did not make him any more attractive. “I charge $125 per month for everyone else, but I thought I could let this room go for, oh, maybe $110?”

  Dominick chuckled a little to himself, then said, “I’ll give you $60 a month.”

  Crow took a half step back, as if offended. He stroked his chin like a villain in a black and white movie, then said, “Done. I’ll need first, last, and a deposit against any phone calls you make.”

  Dominick hesitated, but eventually reached out and shook Mr. Crow’s offered hand.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Dominick fought his initial urge to drive back to Emily’s house and introduce himself.

  Hello, I’m Dominick, your soul mate and one true love. In my last life, we were married and lived happily ever after until I went and got myself shot. Yeah, that’s just not gonna fly.

  He spent the next few days trying to find a casual way to run into her, with no success. He came to know her neighborhood as well as his own back in Emeryville.

  So, what am I, Emily’s stalker now? I guess so, but this is different. We love each other, or at least we have loved each other, and I believe we will again. Unless, of course, this is all part of some delusion I’ve been living in since I got shot. Maybe I’m really lying in a coma at a hospital in Middle Falls in 1999.

  Dominick learned what Emily’s schedule was over the next week—what time she went to class, and what time she got out, at least. After that, he gave up staking out her house, but he still tried to position himself to run into her on campus.

  On the Friday of his first week in town, he walked into the Student Union Building again, trying to reconnoiter the layout. Just as he reached the door, Emily pushed it open, heading out. He swung the door wide and tried to come up with something, anything to say, but he was completely tongue-tied. She pushed past him, smiled casually, and said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” was all that came out.

  Emily got to her car and drove away.

  Don’t mention it. Don’t mention it?! Moron! Why not, “Happy to open the door for a beautiful woman?” Probably because that would make me sound like a low-rent Pepe Le Pew.

  That n
ight, Dominick laid on top of the twin bed in his makeshift room, thinking.

  I really believed this would be easy—that if I was ever in her presence, that somehow, some vestige of “us” would be there, that she would recognize me on some level. Instead, she walks right by me like I am a complete stranger. Which, I guess I am.

  Dominick rolled over on the thin, uncomfortable mattress, trying to find a comfortable way to lay on it.

  I could try and prove to her that I already know her. Tell her that I know her guilty pleasure is listening to Barry Manilow records, or that she loves to hoard and eat Pixie Stix in bed, or that she cries every time she watches It’s a Wonderful Life? Nah. Everyone loves Manilow, Pixie Stix, and Jimmy Stewart movies, right? If I told her I knew about that cute little birthmark on her inner thigh it probably wouldn’t go over well, either. I’d probably end up meeting that cop again.

  Another week passed. That Friday afternoon, Dominick sat slumped behind the wheel of his car, half-heartedly reading a used copy of The Grapes of Wrath he had picked up at the book store downtown. Over the top of the book, movement caught his eye and he saw it was Emily and the two girls she was so often with, emerging from the Student Union. Dominick had dubbed the other two girls Debbie One and Debbie Two. Debbie One was a shorter brunette, cute and curvy. Debbie Two was another blonde, like Emily, but not nearly as pretty, especially in Dominick’s eyes.

  They got into the same station wagon that Emily always drove, and headed away from campus. Dominick followed along, berating himself for being such a stalker, but unable to help himself.

  I can’t do this much longer. I’ll go crazy.

  Dominick didn’t even bother to follow the station wagon. He could tell by the route, they were doing what they always did—heading for Emily’s house. Dominick took a side trip to The Point Drive In for a burger and frozen custard, a new habit he had picked up.

  After that, he gassed up the Chevy and thought of heading back to what passed for home at the moment. The thought of the blanket-walled room was too depressing to think about, so he followed the path he had taken so often – back to Emily’s house.

  Just as he passed her house, he saw a car he’d never seen there before—a late sixties Mustang—pull out of the driveway. He could see at least four people inside, and figured that Emily was likely among them.

  Maybe they’ll end up at a place where I can find a way to have an actual conversation with her.

  The Mustang was in no hurry, and was easy to follow as it wound through neighborhoods sticking to surface streets and avoiding the freeway. Eventually it pulled into a parking lot with a sign out front that read, “Sheboygan Falls Lanes.” A neon bowling ball rolled into three neon pins, over and over.

  Dominick turned into the parking lot behind them, but parked in a far off corner. By the time he shut off the car and walked toward where the Mustang was, it was empty. He walked through the double doors that led into the bowling alley. The smell of the aerosol sprayed into hundreds of pairs of bowling shoes, the wax on the lanes, and hot grease from the food court combined into the unmistakable eau du bowling alley smell that was familiar to just about everyone. A cloud of bluish smoke from a thousand cigarettes hung over the entire place.

  Dominick looked around and spotted Debbie One and Debbie Two putting their bowling shoes on at lane sixteen. Emily was nowhere in sight. He walked to the bowling counter, which came more than halfway up his chest.

  Why the heck do they always make these counters so high? To give someone handing out shoes a sense of power?

  Dominick asked for a pair of size ten and a half shoes.

  The man behind the counter stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray overflowing with the burned bodies of its comrades. He blew a cloud of smoke toward Dominick and said, “How many games?”

  “How much per game?”

  “Forty cents a line, or three for a dollar. Fifty cents for the shoes.”

  “I’ll take three games,” Dominick said, and laid a dollar bill and two quarters down on the counter. He smoothed an extra dollar out on the counter. “Can you give me lane fifteen?

  The counterman looked at the dollar, glanced out at lane sixteen, where Debbie Two was rolling a gutter ball. The extra dollar disappeared. “I’ll put you on lane fifteen, then.”

  Dominick picked up the red and tan shoes and walked to the ball rack, looking for a ball with the proper finger grip. As he did, he saw Emily come from the direction of the snack bar. She was walking next to a guy with blond hair, a wispy mustache, and a big smile on his face. They were holding hands.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Dominick stumbled to one of the plastic chairs that was sitting next to the ball rack. Emily and the man Dominick suddenly wanted to kill walked by him without so much as a glance. They joined the other two girls and sat around the lane, talking, not seeming too worried about bowling.

  Dominick’s heart was thudding in his chest. His palms were sweating, and his knees were weak.

  Of course. Of course she has a boyfriend. How could she not? She’s so smart, so pretty, so Emily, of course everyone here would fall in love with her just like I did. Dominick took a deep breath and held it before letting it hiss out between his teeth. Certainly complicates things, though.

  Dominick watched the foursome, heads together, telling some private joke, then leaning back, laughing and laughing.

  I think I might throw up.

  Dominick stood up, steadied himself, and returned to the search for a ball that fit his hand. After a few tries, he found a psychedelic green and orange splattered ball that worked.

  Now I wish I hadn’t tipped the guy to get right next to them.

  Dominick stepped onto lane fifteen and sat the ball down in the proper spot, then sat at the left-hand scoring table. Debbie Two had turned around and was writing their names on the scoresheet.

  Dominick glanced over and saw that she had written, Melody, Sandy, Emily, and Burke down the left hand side of the sheet.

  Burke. Burke? What the hell kind of name is Burke? That sounds like the name of a kid that got beat up a lot in grade school.

  The girl, whose name was apparently either Melody or Sandy, glanced over at Dominick. “If you’re gonna peep on us, the least you can do is write your name down, so we know who’s stalking us.”

  Dominick let out a nervous laugh. “Oh, ha, ha, stalking, ha, ha.” He realized that he might be sounding a little crazy, and that she was likely just joking. “Sorry. I’m Dominick.”

  “Hi. I’m Sandy. This is Melody over here, and the two lovebirds behind us are Burke and Emily.”

  Dominick glanced over his shoulder. Both Burke and Emily smiled at him. Melody said, “Well, hello, foxy. What’s a nice boy like you doing in a bowling alley like this?”

  Dominick blushed a little, shrugged, and looked for a smile he couldn’t find. He stood up to bowl. He was a good athlete, good at almost every sport he ever tried. Except bowling. Somehow his body just didn’t get the hang of the approach, the release, the spin of the ball. He walked to the first set of arrows, lined up just to the right of the pocket, and did his best to send a ball whizzing triumphantly into the pins. Instead, it hooked badly, and just managed to nick the 7 pin on the way by.

  Dominick rolled his shoulders, cricked his neck, and put his fingers over the hand dryer, waiting for the ball to return. When it finally clunked out of the ball return, he went through the same routine. Unremarkably, that produced the same result, except this time there was no 7 pin to knock down.

  Chagrined, Dominick returned to the scorecard, and without sitting down, marked a “1” in the first frame.

  “You have come to the right place, boychik. None of us are auditioning for the Pro Bowler’s Tour, either,” Sandy said.

  “Thanks.”

  After a few frames, Dominick went to the snack bar for a soda and a bag of chips. When he returned, he sat and watched the foursome bowl. Sandy was right—none of them were much better as bowlers. But
being so near Emily, watching her graceful movements as she bowled, then smelling her perfume as she walked past him on her way to sit next to Burke, to hold his hand, to whisper in his ear, was torture.

  Beyond that first smile, neither Emily nor Burke seemed to even notice Dominick. Melody, on the other hand, was more than a little interested. When Dominick sat down to record a score, she would often lean over to say something to him, pushing her shoulder into his. She was very cute, with dark, bouncy hair done in a Dorothy Hamill flip, flashing dark brown eyes, and an ever-present grin. In another life, a life before he had met Emily, Dominick would have been flattered by her attention.

  Here, in this situation, where all he wanted to do was strangle Burke and sit down for a forty year conversation with Emily, it only meant trouble.

  You’d think that living a life for a second time would make everything easier. So, why does it seem to get more complicated instead?

  Dominick finished his second game while the four of them finished their first. He decided to forfeit the third game and get out of there. He had accomplished one goal—to get close to Emily in a social situation, and absolutely nothing had come of it. In fact, he was much further behind the eight ball than he had been. Emily had a boyfriend and, no matter how hard he tried—and he had listened like a hawk listening for a mouse’s rustling—he couldn’t hear Burke say anything lousy. In fact, he seemed like a pretty decent guy, aside from the fact that he was holding Emily’s hand, and occasionally kissing her. On top of that, one of her friends—Melody, as it turned out, not Debbie One—seemed to like him.

  So, how can I tell Melody, “You’re a great girl, but I really want to get with your friend, who, by the way, already has a boyfriend.”

  He sat in the molded plastic chair, took his bowling shoes off and put his Chuck Taylors back on. He grabbed his scoresheet, on which he had recorded scores of 92 and 112, and prepared to toss it away. As he did, Melody leaned over and said, “Hey, not to be too forward or anything, but what are you doing later on tonight?”